From the course: Unreal Engine 5 Essential Training

The Unreal Engine interface - Unreal Engine Tutorial

From the course: Unreal Engine 5 Essential Training

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The Unreal Engine interface

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Now let's take a quick look at the Unreal Engine interface. Now, Unreal Engine is highly configurable, so if you don't have exactly the interface that I have, you can always go into Window, Load Layout, Default Editor Layout and it will give you this. And then we can press on the content drawer and say dock in layout. And that will give you a basic interface. And this is pretty much the default interface you'll see in Unreal Engine. Now there's a number of different components. Like most interfaces, we have a menu along the top. We have a file menu, allows you to open and save things such as levels and projects, as well as import and export. We have an edit; basically cut, copy, and paste. We have a window menu and this allows you to create additional windows if you need additional functionality or reconfigure your interface. And I'll show you that in just a little bit. We also have additional tools that we can use. We have a menu to build your project into a distributable game or level. We have the select tools, select, deselect, and so on. And then finally, we also have a help menu. So if you're confused about something, you can always come to the help menu and go through the documentation. Now in addition to this menu, we have a number of different windows that are open. Now, this main window here has a viewport which is where we will view our work. Now on top of this, we've got basically a save button here, as well as a pulldown that allows you to work in different modes. So in this case, I'm in selection mode, but I could go into modeling, or mesh paint mode, or fracture mode, and so on. Now if you want to add stuff to your project, you can go here and you can say, we can add basic lights. For example, we can add shapes such as cubes and spheres. And there's a whole lot of things that we can add into our project. We also have buttons to work with, what are called blueprints as well as cinematics. This button here will actually play the level like it is a game, and we'll be using that in just a little bit. Now over to the right, we have a side panel that typically has what's called the outliner. Now notice what I just did here. If you hover over any of these windows, you can resize them. So I basically just open this up a little bit so we can see this outliner. And this basically just contains all the objects in your scene. So it's a list of what's in this particular level. And if you click on one of these, you'll see the details for that. Now along the bottom, is probably one of the more important windows, and that's what's called the content browser. So I'm going to resize this so we can see it a little bit more. And this allows you to view all the different content in your project. So you may have a lot of different assets but only using a few in this particular level, everything will be in your content browser. And then finally, along the bottom, we have a number of other options. One is the ability to type in commands, and we also have revision control. So the Unreal Engine interface may seem a little complex, but it's actually pretty straightforward. And as you start to use it, you should be able to get the hang of it pretty quickly.

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